BPM.today

S03E03: BPM Adoption Framework

It has been a very intense and interesting few last weeks in my professional life. Most of you will have noticed that I transferred from Software AG to
Celonis
and some of you might have even noticed that I launched a podcast, together with my friend and partner in BPM-crime

Dr. Russell Gomersall

(from
bpExperts GmbH
). In the very first episode (the next one will come out next week) Russell and I went over a framework that I have developed over the last 12 months and I thought it would be good to briefly explain this framework in an article here as well. If you’re not into reading, but into listening, then I would like to direct you to our podcast here.

First off, let’s discuss the overall set up of the framework. It deals with the, in my opinion, four main success criteria of BPM implementations: 

Sponsorship
Governance
Center of Excellence
Human Affairs

On top of these criteria (as an overlay) there are three levels of understanding: the WHY, the WHAT and the HOW. In the picture below you can see this framework visualised. 

In this post I would like to elaborate a little bit on this framework, and rest assured Russell and I are going in to more detail from episode 2 onwards. 

Sponsorship

To put it in the current generations language: where woud we be without a godfather or godmother (I also believe they would use a different wording for this, but I like to keep it professional on LinkedIn). Somebody who understands the things you want to achieve with BPM and who can actively support it (financially and mentally). Ideally, this person is on C- or C-1 level, but you also need to be pragmatic from time to time and take whatever you can get. 

Another group that is important from the sponsorship perspective is the BPM stakeholder group and obviously this group can be quite large. Think about your process owners group, or the subject matter experts (sometimes called proces experts), but also less obvious stakeholders such as internal control managers or audit / regulation managers or simply business unit directors. All these different stakeholders need to be managed (and there are plenty tools available for that). 

Governance

The second topic is around governance and this is such a broad topic that I can dedicate a whole season of articles to it, so I’ll try to keep it simple for this article. Governance has everything to do with how you organize yourselves as an organisation in order to ensure the validity of the knowledge that you have documented in any shape or form (ideally in a BPM platform or course). This is typically covered via at least via ownership and change procedures. The first one deals with the assignment of clear and unambiguous ownership of the various processes, process domains and/or end to end flows while the second one deals with the way that you have organised who to deal with changes to the existing documentation. 

As you can imagine your documentation collection is not static, it is subject to almost constant change and this change can originate from various sources (think regulation, continuous improvement initiatives, legal or fiscal laws and many more). This means that you also need to consider ways to keep your documented knowledge up to date and ideally this management of change process is executed and managed from a centralised perspective, but more about that later (look out for episodes 6 and 7 of our BPM360 podcast). 

Center of Excellence

The third topic in the BPM adoption framework is around the tooling and the methodology of the documentation effort. The more complex your organisation is, the more complex your documentation requirements will be, but this relationship is not linear because every organisation will require a basic set of artefacts that need to be documented and after that the additional requirements are mere small increments on top of this basic set. Nevertheless, you need some agreements on the way that you are about to document, manage and optimize your business processes (the methodology) and a good platform (the tooling) to get all of this done effectively and efficiently. 

My blogs are known to be tool agnostic, but I think it is good to state that I am recently moved from Software AG (ARIS) to Celonis (Celonis Process Management). There are a number of enterprise capable tools in the market and for comparisons please refer to the analysts reports (Forrester, Gartner, Everest group) or to individuals with a lot of understanding of this market (

Mark McGregor

or

Roger Tregear

to name just two). 

The biggest pitfall that organisations fall in to when starting their BPM journey by the way is that they start with this topic (method and tooling) before addressing the other three topics and that will eventually lead to a decelerated or arrested development of their BPM capabilities. 

Human Affairs

This is by far the most underrated topic in the BPM universe, and also very often outside of this universe, but that is not the scope of this article. BPM still is perceived as a technology project, rather than a behavioural and managerial project and one of the consequences of that is that especially the communication part of the journey does not receive the attention it deserves or even requires. Communication is the most effective channel to make sure that people in your organisation will be more likely to adopt the new way of working (i.e. adopting a more process centric way of managing the way of working) and by not giving this enough attention you will decrease the likelihood of having a successful implementation project. 

The same applies to the organisation aspect of this topic. Think about the staffing of the project team, but also the staffing of the CoE that you might be setting up and more specifically the fact that you need these two in parallel for a while (when the first documented processes are published in your new BPM platform, you will de facto be in a business as usual mode as well as in a project mode and you cannot expect the project team to also cover the BAU). But wait, there is more…Did you already think about career paths for process management jobs and succession planning? When developing a mature BPM capability these topics also need to be addressed sooner or later. 

Wrapping up

The BPM Adoption framework is not rocket science, in fact, it can be applied to virtually every technology project (just replace the method and tooling section by the technology of your choice) but the fact that it is quite generic does not mean it is not relevant and applicable. I’ve been using this framework a lot of the last 24 months and the general feedback from my clients was that it did open their eyes on things that they did not think about yet. So, stay tuned for episode 2 and beyond of our podcast to find out more about all of this, but specifically for BPM of course.

To be continued…

Ciao

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